Bitcoin has died 59 times this year!
In case you have not seen them before, the 99bitcoins.com website has a section dedicated to Bitcoin Obituaries. In total, close to 120 articles from multiple publications have been written about the 'iminent death' of Bitcoin. The first one recorded on December 2010 and the most recent one was just a few weeks ago, on the 8th of December 2016.
2016 has been a sad year with a lot of celebrity deaths, fortunately, as we can attest, Bitcoin has not been one of them. Here's to proving everyone wrong next year as well.
Read all the obituaries here
Monero finishes the year with good news.
One of the first anonymous cryptocurrencies, Monero (XMR), seems to be finishing an overall successful year with higher than average volume. Helped by both the ZCash launch boost and by a more general concern for privacy, Monero has been one of the winners in 2016. Over the last 12 months, it is up Ƀ 0.01073 (1,012.26%) with relatively high overall volume as well XMR 157.87 M / Ƀ 1,498.76 K. It's had a slow start of the year with the price being relatively stable until late August when it reached a high of 0.0265 BTC or $15 (at that time). Against the dollar, it is up $10.26 (2,386.05%) since the beginning of 2016.
It hasn't been smooth sailing all the way though, the price slowly crashed down to $4.5 by the beginning of November. It's recovered since and it is trading between $10 and $11 now.
Facing tough competition from ZCash and Dash but with a general drive for more anonymity from the community, who knows what 2017 has in store.
Follow Monero here
Ethereum stable over Christmas
With all the Ethereum drama in the last few months, it's easy to overlook the positives. In the last 12 months, it is up Ƀ 0.006052 (299.60%) against BTC and $ 6.34 (693.65%) against the dollar. Having said that, it's hard not to point out that this is far from the highest price it has traded at, in March it reached a value of 0.0371 BTC ($15.17 at that time) and in June a high of $21.5 (0.02799 BTC).
Based just on volume it has been the second most traded cryptocurrency (BTC being the first) with over 9.3 million BTC and on the USD side, over 596 million in the last 12 months.
Next year has a lot in store for ETH on the development front and it will be another make or break year for everyone involved in the ETH space. There are good news around the corner with SWARM (the Ethereum storage layer) and ENS (Ethereum name service) entering beta, CASPER (the Ethereum proof-of-stake algorithm) getting closer to production level and a lot of EVM (Ethereum virtual machine) optimizations. We'll also get to find out how many of the projects that have started this year on the Ethereum platform (Dapps - decentralized applications) will actually see the light of day.
All in all, after a rocky year, Ethereum seems poised to take 2017 by storm. Whether it will be a success story or another year plagued by drama, only time will tell.
Follow Ethereum here
Stay tuned!
Tomorrow and the day after we'll cover more interesting coin yearly stats and on Friday we'll do a 'Bitcoin in 2016' newsletter.
We'll get back to covering news as soon as there are any, as you can imagine, it's been a slow news week so we had to come up with something.
